Warning: Dense Writing About My Future Plans

I turned in my essay, a long piece about Gertrude Stein's destruction of absolute denotation that I called "Incredible Prose." I stood in the hallway for a few moments after I'd handed the essay to Prof Fritzell, trying to think of something profound to say. Prof Fritzell half-suppressed a laugh at a joke no one else had heard. I told him that my essay had run a little long (it's half again as long as it should be) and he said he didn't care about stuff like that. I'll never have a class with him again.

I picked up Essence of Story from Prof Dintenfass, and had a 45-minute talk about my future. He said that my story was the best high school story he'd read in years, and that I'd shown a lot of improvement in writing it. The praise, as he predicted, went to my head, but I know by now that I'm neither the most skilled nor the most talented writer at Lawrence, so his comments didn't inflate my ego as much as they once would've.

My rather cynical adviser said that he'd decided not to dissuade me from attending graduate school, though he spent a while telling me how graduate school English departments really work: I'll be reading a lot of mediocre, politically correct fiction. I'll be encouraged to embrace a jargon-filled critical theory and write jargon-filled essays.

The future is still pretty fuzzy, but it's a ways off. I don't even know when I'm going to London.

Prof Dintenfass did convince me that getting a second major in Linguistics, just to secure my economic future, isn't the best idea. Intro to Linguistics was interesting, and The Philosophy of Language sounds good, but I don't have the enthusiam to slog through classes like "Syntax" and "Phonology."

So instead of some Linguistics course like Topic in Logic, next term I'm signed up for Shakespeare, Satire, and Contemporary German Culture & Politics. It'll be a fun term, and hopefully an easy one. The Master Plan requires a light workload.

And with that, I'm done with this term. Tomorrow I leave for home.